Comic Books!

New York Comic Con, like a vestigial tail, is now behind us. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones on the Con floor and know firsthand of the amazing announcements, projects and previews which just went down. I’ve heard the Evil Dead remake footage was impressive. I hear both Brian Michael Bendis and Iron Man will be joining Guardians of the Galaxy, that Dan Slott is changing Spider-Man for 2013, that the ATMs didn’t work, that the cosplay was top-notch and the LEGO was cool.

Above all else, the biggest stories, surprises and revelations were almost all Comic BOOK based. SDCC is great, but SDCC is to comics as Playboy is to articles. The New York Comic Con remains a very hands-on, fans-on comic book show.

HOW ‘BOUT COMICS?

This week, DC is launching their new “The Cheetah” super-villainess in Justice League #13. Traditionally, The Cheetah has been a crazy lady who dresses up in a catsuit and harasses Wonder Woman due to her being empowered by Jungle Cat Gods or some such. In the new 52, The Cheetah is poised to get a real chance at iconic super villain stardom!

I think the new angle is that The Cheetah is an empowered Amazon, much like Wonder Woman herself, but that she was pushed off of a building by Christopher Walken and was brought back to life by cats.

Sounds strange, I know… No stranger, however, than The Zaucer of Zilk #1, a weird new Image book with some British talents behind it. Image is still one of the best creator-owned American comics publishers, so it is no surprise that some UK talents would take advantage of the free atmosphere to work out a book that sounds completely bonkers.

The Zaucer of Zilk centers around a wizard traveling through realities with his assistants trying to save multiple realities, but with a bunch of “Zs” thrown in for extra weirdness. It all comes off as a tribute to the classic Dr. Strange tales of the ‘60s. SOUNDS GOOD!

Speaking of nostalgia, Image is also hoping you’ll take a ride on a Cyberforce reboot. Once Image’s top seller, Cyberforce harkens back to a time when it was cool to have a team whose superpowers included “having as much metal on your costume as super-humanly possible” and “whatever the X-Men are doing, only more extreme.” AH, the ‘90s!

It’s getting hard to tell what is happening between the lines of publisher, online publisher, digital comics and print comics. This reboot of a once-huge Image comic was funded by fan donations through Kickstarter to Silvestri’s “Top Cow” studio. Image is acting as printer and distributor for a comic funded through the internet, famous ‘cause of print.

SWEET WEEK

Boy, there sure are some great books out this week! IDW has the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Annual 2012 #1, which achieves “Must Have” status in my book as it’ll be written and drawn by Kevin Eastman. Fans of the AVENGERS movie will want to check out THANOS Son of Titan #1 (or just go buy any of the many copies of Infinity Gauntlet available at Forbidden Planet) in order to get an idea of who that purple alien guy at the end of the movie was.

AND let’s all have a good chuckle with those wacky funsters, the Marvel Zombies, in the sure-to-be-classic holiday one-shot, the Marvel Zombies Halloween Special #1! Yay!